Wednesday, May 06, 2009

Bely's scream

And cold lights in the gray skyClothed the tsar’s Winter PalaceAnd the armored warrior in black won’t answerUntil dawn overtakes him

Then, reddening above the watery abyssLet him lower his sword more gloomily,To lie dead in a useless struggleWith the savage mob for an ancient fairy tale.

And a story. I found this in Mochulsky’s biography of Andrei Bely, which is, unfortunately, the only one in English.

In 1921, after Blok had died, and Bely was trying to get out of Russia, Bely gave a lecture that was supposed to be on Blok’s poetry. Maria Tsvetaeva was there. She wrote that in the middle of the lecture, Bely lost control and began to scream: “From starvation! From Starvation! Gout from starvation, instead of overeating!” and then he went on to his no doubt astonished audience:

‘ I have no room! I am the writer of the Russian land, and I don’t even have a stone on which to lay my head… I wrote Petersburg! I foresaw the downfall of tsarist Russia, I had a dream of the end of the tsar in 1905!… I cannot write! It’s a disgrace! I must stand in line to get my ration of fish! I want to write! But I also want to eat! I am not a spirit! For you I am not a spirit!.. But I am a proletarian… Lumpenproletariat. Because I am all in rags. Because they did away with Blok, and they want to do away with me. I will not permit it! I will scream until I am heard! A-a-a-a!…’

I will not permit it. It was on ancient fairy tales, and their bloody destruction, that we have built this artificial paradise. And it will not last. It is dying in our bloodstreams as I write this. And in the sky, the tree branches, in the great migrations. So: what was it for? All this happiness.

LI, ah, one more passage from Marina that the Bely phrase you quoted on Notes from the Zona - " I remained healthy by removing my skin" - makes me think of. Please pardon if I only give the translation in French.

une personne écorchée - the skinned person, the écorché, is difficult to translate into English. In my Larousse, they translate it in terms of an anatomical doll, or a cutaway - but in English, skinless is used for chickens. Is this a blessing? Some lack in the repertoire of tortures?

Anyway, I've been on a Bely kick, obviously, Amie. Disappointingly, there is no big bio - not even, as far as I can tell, in Russian. How odd! And everybody says Silver Dove needs to be retranslated. It is hard to imagine, say, James Joyce receiving this treatment. And all Russian speakers seem to agree that Bely was the Russian Joyce.

I found an essay on his death, written in 1943, by an exiled scholar who cites a critic who said, Bely was a lone trapeze artist under the dome of his ego.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.